The Chinese Dream

The Chinese literature's Orwell offers us a dystopian satire of today's China: a poetic and unyielding fable about totalitarianism and the suppression of History.

"Chinese tyrants have never limited themselves to controlling people's lives; they have always sought to penetrate people's minds and reshape them from within."

The People's Republic of China has managed to develop a technology that allows it to record its citizens' dreams and replace them with others. The goal is to promote President Xi Jinping's Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous official, has been appointed project director after decades of loyal service to the Party. But just as he is about to introduce an innovative brain implant that will replace traumatic memories with a collective dream of national supremacy, his sanity begins to unravel. Painful flashbacks flood his mind: nightmares of the Cultural Revolution that threaten to destroy his aspiration for a glorious future.

This darkly comical fable is a dystopian vision of repression, the suppression of history, and the amnesia imposed by the Chinese state; an unyielding satire set in contemporary China by the hand of one who, according to the Financial Times, "has deservedly been called the Orwell and Solzhenitsyn of Chinese literature."

Critics have said:
"One of the most important and courageous voices in Chinese literature."
Gao Xingjian, Nobel Laureate in Literature

"A cross between the Red Guards and a kind of Kurt Vonnegut: powerful!... A biting satire by a novelist in exile."
Margaret Atwood, via Twitter

"A savage satire of Chinese authoritarianism and censorship# Ma is very explicit and, for a man of known quiet demeanor, a more enraged interpreter of China than his compatriots... Plausible and brutal, this is his boldest work, and, despite its brevity, the most elegiac."
Financial Times

"Outrageous[...] He has deservedly been called the Orwell and Solzhenitsyn of Chinese literature."
Book of the Year, Financial Times

"The Chinese Dream is sharper, as political allegory, than his previous novels. It crackles with blunt satire of Chinese officialdom and a mordant wit vaguely reminiscent of Gary Shteyngart's outburst at Russian oligarchs in Absurdistan, or even Nikolai Gogol's portraits of Russia's provincial aristocrats in Dead Souls# The Chinese Dream may be the purest distillation yet of Ma's talent for probing the country's darkest corners and exposing what he calls the Communist Party's #moral failings#."
Mike Ives, The New York Times

"A masterpiece of political satire."
Kirkus Review of Books

"Creepily Orwellian... makes Mao's Cultural Revolution look like a bit of fun."
Mail on Sunday

"A scathing and audacious indictment of contemporary China, and a lyrical exposé of the false utopia created by the Communist Party and its current lifelong leader, Xi Jinping... [The Chinese Dream] is an ingenious, yet powerful, confrontation of China's past and present."
Publishers Weekly